Something else I'm always in trouble for

Very soon after starting this punishment, I thought with envy of the lines Iris had to write recently, simply because hers was so much shorter. This is now what happens when I break my rule through carelessness - 50 lines each time. At the moment I'm just about able to write them faster than I'm earning them, and it's definitely a strong incentive to be more careful. Half way through this lot today I wanted to text M and whine about how long the line was, but my finely-honed sense of self-preservation saved me.

Sorry about the awful picture quality, I've lost my proper camera.

Not-Quite-So-Impending Doom

School hasn't even started yet, and already I'm in trouble.

Okay, this isn't actually school-related trouble, but I'm feeling sufficiently gloomy about it that I want to write about it somewhere.

Quite simply, I broke one of my rules. And I knew it was a rule when I broke it, and I still broke it. So I'm in trouble.

M expressed some disappointment when I told him about it - then he thought about it for a while and clarified that I had, indeed, known that it was a rule and had gone ahead and broken it anyway, and all of a sudden I'm not looking at a simple spanking. Instead, I'm looking at a spanking until he's sure I'm not going to wilfully break rules again, and then I'll get the spanking I was due for breaking the rule.

This would be bad enough, I think you'll appreciate that I feel guilty and sorry and am generally regretting my thoughtlessness (or rather, insufficient consideration of the consequences) - but I'm having to wait for the punishment as well. Real Life is intruding, as it so often does, and I don't know when it's going to happen.

The waiting is almost as bad as the punishment is probably going to be. I can't say "as bad", or "worse", because M has made references such as "taking [my] punishment out of [my] hide" (gulp). But it's pretty awful.

Unexpected

I had a chat with M this morning about my course. I mentioned how Abel motivated Haron's studies and from my previous post how praise and acknowledging good work were going to be important to me. From this we moved to talking about how he was going to monitor my work - I'll get my timetable next week and we'll then sit down together and work out 'study' and 'play' hours.

We also talked about grades - when I did my BSc, every piece of work you did could be classified as a fail, 3rd, 2:2, 2:1 or 1st. This time, apparently, ther is only 'pass' and 'distinction'. And I've been warned by previous students that 'pass' is pretty easy to get, but 'dstinction nearly impossible.

M said that he expected me to work steadily and have any pieces of work completed a suitable amount of time before the deadline (e.g. a week before for 'big' essays, projects, etc.) - and that he'd read them to comment on sentence structure, grammer, etc.

It felt like having cold water poured over me. He wants to what? No one ever reads my work - apart from the people who mark it, of course, but that's different because they read loads and are used to them being rubbish. I'm immediately convinced that everything I write is going to be awful, and patently not good enough.

I know it's not true - I got decent grades the first time around and could have done better if I'd done better and, for example, written essays earlier than the night before they were due. But this is going mean he's monitoring my work a lot more closely than I'd expected. Help.

We also talked about what happens between being given an assignment and handing it in - I get very anxious at the thought of too much structure/rigidity about how I'm supposed to study, fortunately M agreed with my suggestion that I be expected to do "something" towards an assignment every week, and have it done a week (for example) before it's due, as enough structure to give us something to work with but without stifling me.

Maybe this will work after all. If I can get over the thought of him reading what I write.

Discipline

One of the problems of going back into full-time education is that I'm remembering just how good I was at procrastination and work-avoidance the last time around. It's scary to think about, as the stakes are higher this time.

Hopefuly the presence of a loving disciplinarian in my life may help. Being accountable to someone else, knowing that someone else is cheering me on and willing me to do well, but is also ready to step in and set me back on the right path if I fall off the wagon (to mix my metaphors), is a great comfort.

We shall see.